


Remembering Home

by crossingwinter



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, F/M, Gen, I wrote a significant portion of this while drunk on an airplane, but it held up well in editing so yeah
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-21
Updated: 2014-06-21
Packaged: 2018-02-05 14:35:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1821979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one can fix him; Bucky doesn’t even remember what it was like to be fixed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remembering Home

It began on a rainy Wednesday in late April.  Bucky opened his eyes and saw silver and felt wet on his face and heard wind in the trees…trees?  There shouldn’t have be trees--not here, not this many.

Where was he?

*

Bucky didn’t like to think about the following year.  Not that it wasn’t a bad year--hardly that.  It was certainly better than the one that preceded it.  But it was a hard thing to face your failings, to realize that everything you wanted to be, everything you’d tried to be, was nothing.  

*

Brooklyn took him back in late July, when the air was heavy with unfallen rain and the sky at sunset was the sort of yellow you’d piss out dehydrated.  It felt like years since he’d been back, and the thought almost made him laugh because it had been years since he’d been back.  But somehow a year seemed like less time now that he was older than it did when he was ten and waiting to grow up.

Now he wished he were ten and that growing up was something he’d never done.  The world seemed a brighter place when he was ten and running down Flatbush on his way to Steve’s to see if he could drag him out to the park on a sunshiney day.  Steve hadn’t liked going outside when they’d been little.  He had bad allergies, and his skin burned in the sun, and he could never run like Bucky could.  But he always went with Bucky when Bucky came by and insisted.  Bucky thought it did him good.  Now though—now it was Bucky’s turn not to want to go outside. 

He heard a knock on his door and the quiet rattle of brass as Steve rested his hand on the handle outside, waiting.  “Bucky?”

Bucky’s throat was dry, his skin was damp with sweat, and the air weighed heavily on his skin.  He could smell dust and something distinctly salty and Brooklyn but he couldn’t really move so he just lay there and stared at the ceiling, letting his body continue on as he just traced the patterns of the cracked plaster across the room. 

Eventually he heard Steve leave, but he knew Steve would be back.  He always went back for Steve.  Steve would always come back for him. 

*

Steve was different than he was when Bucky first left for North Carolina.  He was taller now and seemed to have muscles.  He breathed heavily when they run together, but it didn’t seem to incapacitate him the way it did when they were younger.  There was something fuller about him, something adult about him—as though he’d only now become the man that Bucky had seen in him since he was little and standing up to George Trencher in the street in front of PS38.

He remembered Chapel Hill, where pretty girls in skirts would smile at him, their makeup perfect and their hair pristine.  Brooklyn girls didn’t smile at him the same way.  It was like they know something was off.  The ones that _did_ smile at him smile in ways he didn’t like anymore—smiles that were too knowing and too aware of spoons and in those years of his life that he lost, he had promised himself he’d never date a girl with a spoon ever again.

The nice girls all smiled at Steve—the ones who were nervous, and gentle, and obviously intelligent.  The bad girls all smiled at Bucky. 

*

Steve liked to draw in charcoal on the walls of their apartment.  He drew everything that came into his mind, portraits of Bucky, or his friends from Art School, sometimes he just tries patterns, swirls, blocks, zig-zags, stars and stripes.  Whenever the white walls were too crowded, Steve would take a sponge and wash it all away—a fresh canvas.  Bucky wished it were just as easy to wipe himself away, wipe himself clean.

Bucky, when he didn’t want to be by himself when he was alone, would sit and read and Steve would draw him on the walls.  He hated the drawings—and Steve knew it, but Steve drew him anyway.  He hated the drawings because that Bucky—the Bucky on the wall is pale and thin and has dark sunken eyes and looks nothing like the way that Bucky is.

*

The first day of class was hard.  It was weird being back in stadium seats staring down at a little old man with poor posture, nattering on about William Faulkner.  Bucky felt his hands shaking, and after only a few minutes he knew he was going to fail the class because he couldn’t stop focusing on the way the metal ring of his spiral notebook felt under his finger and how he knew that sensations were numbed right now and not all they could be and if only he could feel precisely again, because his feelings were everything but precise now.

He remembered iron in his mouth—iron from blood, his blood? Olga’s blood? He couldn’t remember, but blood tastes like metal and he wished for just a second he couldn’t remember that blood tastes the way his spiral notebook would taste if he bit down on the spiral.  It would hurt his teeth, make them screech, probably.  If he were high he’d think that the bone was peeling away from his teeth—enamel and all—when plaque was coming loose.  He would feel more blood—more iron—in his mouth, even though it wouldn’t actually be there because his teeth wouldn’t actually be broken because little steel rings like that couldn’t break his teeth and—

Lecture was over and he didn’t realize it until someone was asking him if he could maybe move so that they can all file out of the row.  Bucky scrambled to his feet, blinking his eyes furiously, trying to get them to focus again because shit, they were supposed to be able to focus again, and _shit_ he was in rehab for so long he shouldn’t be continuing to feel this way, and then he makes his way out of the building and back to the street and the fresh air and the white noise of New York City. 

*

Steve’s art had gotten better.  Drastically so.  Bucky always assumed it was because Steve was in Art School now, so he had good teachers.  Steve said it was because he’d drawn a lot when he’d been in the hospital. 

Bucky didn’t like to think about Steve in a hospital.  He didn’t know how to ask what it was like.  He knew what metamorphosis was, of course.  He, more than maybe anyone else Steve knew, knew what that was.  But Steve was better.  Bucky was worse.  

And besides, Steve never asked Bucky about rehab. 

*

Steve brought Natasha home on a Thursday evening.  It was past ten, and Bucky was staring at his computer, wishing words would come as easily as they had in North Carolina.  

She had red hair, and blue eyes and the appearance of omniscience that Bucky would once have chased after.  She was in one of Steve’s classes—some sort of painting class?  Bucky got them mixed up.  But she wasn’t in the Art School.  Steve said she studied dance.  She was just taking the class for fun. 

They bantered in the kitchen as Steve fried up some burgers.  (“You’re such an old man, you know?” “And how would you know?” “I know these sorts of things.” “How’s that?”)

Bucky tried to keep them out of his head.  They had no place in his head—as full of cobwebs and rust as it was, as full of dancing demons and toxic skeletons and maybe he should write _that_ down instead because it was certainly better than whatever bullshit he had come up with before and _god_ he wanted to smoke and—

“Hey, you want a burger?” Steve called.

Bucky looked up.  Natasha was leaning around Steve, her eyes on him.  She and Steve had different color blue in their eyes.  Steve’s were blue like the Brooklyn sky but Natasha’s were the same blue as Olga’s and he felt the air trickling out of his nose and through the five-o-clock-shadow on his upper lip.  He shook his head.

“I’m making one for you anyway,” Steve announced.  “Rare.  Drenched in cheese.  Try to resist that, Barnes.”

Bucky snorted, and closed his laptop.  He felt like his bones were creaking as he stood and wondered suddenly if that was what Steve had felt whenever Bucky had dragged him outside growing up.

Steve smiled at him when he came to stand in the doorway of the kitchen.  Natasha did not.

*

Steve had a lot of friends.  Natasha, and Tony from LA and Thor from Stockholm and Bruce who’d just come back from India and Clint from Bucky wasn’t sure. Steve tried to drag him out with them sometimes.  Bucky didn’t go though.  Bucky didn’t do friends who weren’t Steve just now.

*

There were things he was glad of, he supposed.  Glad to have been made aware of when he was in North Carolina.  

He tried writing about them, but the words were never there when he was writing.  And besides, how do you turn saturation into words?  Because that was what it was—color saturation.  It was like he’d been living his life in black and white—like a dog, or a person from the nineteen forties—and then he’d done shrooms and suddenly he was Dorothy in _The Wizard of Oz_ , seeing yellows and blues and reds and fuscias and how they flowed into one another and how they were different from one another.

A picture was worth a thousand words, and Bucky couldn’t even think of four to string together when it came to describing the colors in his head.

*

He tried explaining that to Steve once.  Steve didn’t understand.  Steve just did colors.  He just mixed and matched and saw and it was what he saw, why did he need to describe it?

Bucky needed words to paint the picture.  And words were suddenly nothing in comparison to everything else.

*

It didn’t help that his professors were bad.  They all wore tweed and looked like they spent all their time smoking and drinking and not ingesting anything.  He didn’t know why it bothered him.  But it did.

*

Steve’s friends were over again.  It was well past midnight and Tony was regaling them all with some story of some conquest while Thor asked him questions about his slang. Clint and Steve were arguing drunkenly about what was more important: a strong defense or a precise attack.  Bucky didn’t know what the context was.  He was just trying to get to his room—just past the noise so he could flop on his bed and count the number of cars that drove by his window while he fell asleep.

He found Natasha sitting at his desk, reading through his notebook.

“What are you doing?” he snapped.  “That’s private.”

“That’s what’s fun about it,” she shrugged.  “You went to Chapel Hill?”

“Yes.”  Steve had definitely told her that.  He didn’t know why she was asking.

“I have family there,” she shrugged, but didn’t elaborate.

“That’s great.  Now, if you don’t mind—I’m tired.  I’d like to get to bed.”

She closed his notebook and stood up.  She was small, he realized.  Shorter than him by a full head, and when she reached the door, she paused.

“What did you do, anyway?”

“Everything.”

*

He wished he hadn’t said that.   He really wished.  Because now, whenever it was just Nat (as Steve called her sometimes) and Steve and not the rest of the guys over, she’d ask him about it.

“When you say everything,” she’d ask.  “Define.”

“Everything,” he replied, not looking up from his computer, not wanting to see Steve’s face.

“There’s a lot of everything.”

“Why do you care?”

“Why wouldn’t I care?”

Bucky didn’t have an answer to that, so he began the list.  He stared at his hands as he spoke, his skin was cracked and dry and his nails needed cutting and since when had his veins been so prominent?  It was a thought that made him laugh.  He could answer _that_.

*

He and Steve had taken to jogging together, running through Prospect Park like he had when they were kids.  Steve liked running now that his body wasn’t fucked to shit, and Bucky liked running because he liked feeling blood pumping and if he ran a few miles he got into a runner’s high and a runner’s high was all he was allowed these days.  Funny though now he couldn’t breathe as well, and sometimes he wondered just how much he had smoked when he’d been blitzed.

Sometimes, when they were running, Steve would talk.  He’d talk about classes, he’d talk about something that Tony was making, or Thor getting lost in the subways again, or even just pointing out birds that he noticed along the path.  Sometimes Steve mused about morality and forgiveness, and kindness, and goodness in ways that made Bucky’s stomach twist because what were those things anymore?

He didn’t respond usually.  Funny—he’d been a chatterbox growing up and his mother had shouted at him to shut up so often that he could sometimes still hear it in his sleep.  Not now though.  He focused on taking deep breaths, the calm of Steve’s voice, and how none of this was the same.  None of it would matter, ultimately.  Because one day, he’d be dead, and what would everyone say of him then?  What would he have amounted to then?

What was the point of musing over morality when mortality always beat it?

*

“I’m going to a party in Williamsburg tonight. Wanna come?”   Natasha was bending over the couch next to him, looking at his laptop.  He shifted the screen away from her.

“You want Steve,” he replied dryly before turning back to his computer.

“Not his crowd,” Natasha said evenly. “You in?”

That had him intrigued.  He could guess what she meant by it. Steve wasn’t one for ragers, and certainly wasn’t one for parties where the illegal was happening in full force.  Steve practically oozed “out of sight, out of mind” at parties.  He played beer pong and spoke to girls in pretty dresses who thought he looked like he belonged in a fifties movie because Steve _did_ belong in a fifties movie.  The one time that Bucky had gone with him, he’d grit his teeth for a full four hours because Steve could laugh and enjoy himself and all Bucky could do was count how many times he kept himself from having a drink—if only because it would give him something to do. 

He knew he shouldn’t—that it could end so badly, that months of rehab and being careful and taking care could fly out the window. But there was something about the way that Natasha was looking at him, her eyes wide and unblinking and he almost felt confident that none of that would matter.  “Sure,” he said at last.  Natasha patted him on the shoulder and a few hours later, he found himself waiting for the G train to make its way up from Smith, his arms crossed over his chest and his teeth on edge.

Natasha was wearing black—leggings, boots, leather jacket, the works, and for a second, he thought she looked like a secret agent.  He almost said as much, but instead he grunted a greeting.

“You clean up nice, you know,” Natasha said, “when you shave and shower and such.”

“Look at me in all my former glory,” he replied. “To think I always used to be like this.”

“It’s funny what fucks us up,” she agreed.

“Not really.”

“No.  You’re right.  Not really.”

They stood waiting for a time, ignoring the group of giggling hipsters down the way who were completely blazed.

“I guess that’s what parties are for—to drink until you forget.”

“Don’t let me drink,” was his only reply. “Even if I want to. Don’t.”

“The gateway drug?” she teased.

“When I’m drunk I don’t say no,” he shrugged.

She nodded.

* 

He ended up back at her place.  It felt nice to fuck someone again. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done it sober, and he liked the way she felt, warm in his arms and doing creative things with her tongue that no one down in North Carolina seemed to have thought of.  In a lot of ways, it was nice just to know that he _could_ fuck someone.  Because it seemed to be the only sin left for him.  And it wasn’t as though anyone would want to be in a relationship with him because who would want to date someone who was as much of a mess as he was, so it was nice to know he could just end up in bed with someone. That was what the rest of his life would be—fucking girls like Natasha who knew better than to get too close, but didn’t mind getting just close enough.

When they’d both come, and were lying there, Natasha traced the trackmarks on his arm left arm.

“Only the left?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“What was the point of fucking up both?”

* 

If Steve noticed that Bucky let Natasha curl up against him like a cat now, he said nothing.  If Steve noticed that Bucky smiled sometimes, or left the apartment, or seemed only marginally less miserable, he said nothing.

That was the thing about Steve.  He was a little bit terrified that Bucky would tell him the truth, and so he didn’t ask the question.  And Bucky just wanted him to ask the damn question.

* 

When they’d been little, when Steve had been sickly and Bucky had been healthy—the golden boy that everyone wanted to be like—Bucky hadn’t known how to ask Steve if he was feeling better. He hadn’t known how to ask, because how could you ask something like that?  The answer was probably no.  Steve never felt better because Steve was sick. And his sickness wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. 

Bucky wondered if Steve was as bitter that he’d never asked as Bucky was now.

* 

Temptation came in all forms, Bucky found. That was why it was called temptation—because it was a vague concept that could be applied to nearly anything.  And Bucky found it everywhere.  He smelled weed on campus and he had to close his eyes and power on by, because if he stopped and breathed it for too long, none of anything would matter. He went to parties with Natasha and found that the stink of beer and vodka and rum was almost as good as the taste, so why not have a taste.  Natasha was good at keeping him away from it, though.  She took his request seriously.  More seriously than Olga had.

* 

He went with Steve and his friends to Natasha’s dance recital, and suddenly he felt like he understood her.  Her body arched in ways that didn’t seem wholly human, her limbs moved with the sort of precision that Bucky knew he’d never be able to manage.

And most of all, more than he had ever noticed before, he saw physical strength.  Natasha could stand on one toe, or her hands and hold herself in contortions that Bucky didn’t have the flexibility for, arms, legs, torso, everything holding still as stone while moving smoothly like water. 

Steve drew, painted the world the way he saw it. Bucky, when he could make his mind stand still, wrote.  Natasha danced.

*

“She was Russian or something.  Yeah, Russian, I think,” said Bucky. They were waiting for the train that would take them back to Manhattan, and bed, because even if they weren’t dating—and they weren’t.  He was adamant about that—they still ended up in bed a few times a week. “She just…I don’t know. She didn’t let me say no. She didn’t want me to say no. Because if I said no, she’d have to deal with the fact that she wasn’t saying no.  And I think that was beyond her.  She was fucked up.”

“Yeah,” Natasha said.

“I loved her.  She was great.  Really great.  Vibrant. And loving.  And all sorts of things.  She blew every one of those Southern Belles out of the water, you know?”

Natasha nodded.  She didn’t ask—but when Natasha didn’t ask, he knew that she was asking anyway.

“Her name was Olga.”

“That’s what I thought,” she sighed.

He glanced at her.  “What the fuck does that mean?”

“She’s my cousin.”

*

Betrayal came in all sorts of forms—like temptation. Betrayal could mean not helping you when you needed to be helped.  That was Olga.  Olga, who was right there with him as he shot up, who said she didn’t care if he was hooked because she loved him, even though the him she loved wasn’t him, it was a different him, another Bucky who didn’t belong to Brookyn and Steve, but who belonged to heroin and Olga. 

Betrayal could mean not asking the question, letting you fall, letting you feel alone in the world when they think they’re there for you—that’s Steve.

And betrayal can mean knowing who you are, and what you’ve done, but letting you think that they have no idea.

*

“Olga’s always been…I don’t know.  She’s been out of control most of our lives. Her dad and mine, they used to compare us a lot.  And it didn’t do either of us any good.  I don’t know—there’s so much of Olga that could be me.  That _is_ me. And that makes me want to fix it, you know?  Like, whether it’s her or me, there’s red in the ledger and I’d like to clean it up.”

“So I’m here to make you feel better about yourself?” he demanded loudly, his voice filling the subway station, echoing off old steel and concrete he wondered not for the first time if that really was his voice—because it sounded so different from the voice he heard in his head. 

“No—that’s not what I mean,” she replied calmly.

But he didn’t care.  He got on the Brooklyn bound F when it came, and took it back alone.

*

His hair was growing long, but he didn’t feel like cutting it.  He hadn’t shaved in at least three days, and didn’t know when he would.  And Steve didn’t say anything.

*

He wondered sometimes if anyone else could really know Steve the way he did.  Tony certainly claimed too, and the two of them were thick as thieves most of the time. Tony did have a way of getting Steve to open up about his illness, probably because Tony knew what it was to feel alone in the world—if for completely different reasons.  But Tony had never seen Steve as Bucky had—thin, pasty, wondering if that day would be another fainting day as they walked from eleventh grade English to pre-calculus. 

Sometimes, Bucky wondered if Steve felt bitter that Bucky knew him that way.  Maybe that’s why he didn’t ask any questions.  Because that was what Steve would have done when they were in high school—ask what was wrong, be there for Bucky because Bucky was there for him, just the two of them against the world, even if Bucky could have had fifty others with him against the world.  And now that Steve was better, Steve was normal, he couldn’t put it behind him because Bucky was back.

Or maybe there was there some other sort of bitterness there.  That Bucky was fucked up and needed help and Steve just wanted to be normal?  Or maybe, just maybe, he didn’t know how to handle being the strong one.  So he fled from it.  And Bucky was stuck on his own.

*

“Natasha called for you,” Steve said.

“Hm?” Bucky looked up from his laptop. Words weren’t coming again, and he was getting to the point if maybe he should stop trying because if he wasn’t high what was the point of writing, when he over thought every single word and so they all seemed meaningless because words were supposed to be effortless, natural, they weren’t supposed to be carefully chosen. They were supposed to capture the moment, like a photograph, not paint it after hours of careful study.

It amused him that he thought about them in terms that probably only Steve would understand.

“Bucky?”

“Sorry.  I was zoned.  What were you saying?”

“Did you and Natasha have a fight?”

And there it was—the question he’d been waiting for.

“Not really.”

“Oh.”

 And the moment was gone, and Steve went back to drawing charcoal on the walls.

 

* 

“You’re going to have to talk to me at some point,” Natasha said while Steve was in the kitchen.

Buck didn’t reply.

 

* 

Because what did it matter?  What did it fucking matter that Olga was her cousin—that her dad was quite possible the creepy uncle who had made Olga feel so uncomfortable at her cousin’s Confirmation.  Hell, Natasha probably was that cousin. Natasha knew that Olga had been hit, she’d probably been hit herself.  Natasha didn’t let him drink, didn’t let him smoke, or shoot up, or anything.  She asked him what he thought, she made dry comments about how fucked up they both were, she let him borrow her baseball caps when he went home because his hair always stood on end after they fucked and he didn’t like being on the train with sex hair, didn’t like coming home to Steve and silence with sex hair.

Natasha and Olga weren’t the same people at all.

But Natasha had still lied to him.

*

 He went with Steve to a party one night—one of Steve’s artsy parties in Brooklyn Heights. 

Bucky was good and didn’t drink a thing, but when Steve is playing pong and laughing with Tony and flirting with a brunette with legs that were at least six feet long, Bucky doesn’t say no when a girl—he didn’t even know her name—suggested they get out of there. 

The sex was fine.  She made kind of ridiculous high pitched “oh yes”es when they were humping and Bucky felt almost like his mind was separate from his body, because his body was enjoying it but his mind thinks the whole situation was stupid and couldn’t wait until he was back on the train home.

*

Steve was drawing on the walls when Bucky got home the next morning.  “Where were you?” he asked.

“At a girl’s,” shrugged Bucky.

“Oh?” Steve sounded pleased at that answer. “What’s her name?" 

Bucky shrugged again, and Steve’s face clouded.

“How could you not ask her name?”

“I think I did.  I just forgot.  It didn’t matter.”

Steve stared at him.

“How could it not matter?”

“Why should it?”

Steve stared at him as though only just seeing him. _Do you see me?_ Bucky thought.  _Come on, Steve.  See me.  I’m right here._

“You went home with her,” Steve said at last, his voice weak.  “Bucky—that sort of thing matters.  You don’t just take a girl home without knowing her name.”

“She took me home,” said Bucky.  “She knew my name.  I think it counts.”

“But—”  Steve looked lost—so lost.  And Bucky was ready for it, aching for it, please let him just figure it out, let him work it out.  “How can you do that? Bucky…How?”

“Because when you’re trying to feel something, you take what you can get,” he said.  “When no one hears you screaming, you take what you can get." 

Steve stared at him.  _His eyes are so blue_ , Bucky thought.  The last time he’d noticed a blue that blue, he’d been high as balls on an airplane to Flagstaff because Olga had liked the sound of Flagstaff and he’d had the cash to drop a ticket.  The sky had been blue like that, like Steve’s eyes, and “Your eyes are high-as-balls-Flagstaff-blue. The smell of stir fry in the kitchen is the same smell as the almost-burning-down-the-house-because-you’re-too-high-to-cook soy sauce. The sound the pipes make is the same clinking that hits the back of my head when Olga and I were curled up together after shooting up.  There’s nothing in my life that isn’t a memory of that time—nothing.  Not even you.  So I’ll take what I can get.”

Steve was silent.  And Bucky knew he would stay like that. And this time would probably be no different from all the other times he’d listened in while Natasha asked the questions and Steve said _nothing_ because what was there to say, he didn’t know what to ask, even though he _did_ because it all boiled back to the same question.

“Buck—Are you going to be ok?”

And Bucky laughed.

* 

He remembered the way the air tasted, the first time he got high.  He remembered tasting dust and pollen and something else, because it felt like he was inhaling all those little pieces too.  That was what Steve would never understand.  Because Steve valued his life and his health too much to do anything that hurt. Bucky hadn’t grown up like that.  Bucky had grown up testing his limits. 

* 

He came out of his room to find words drawn onto the wall.  Some of them big, some of them small but words, not pictures.

_I don’t know how to be there for you.  I don’t know what you are, and how you got there, but I’m trying, because I know where you came from.  I don’t know a lot of things, and don’t know if I want to know a lot of things, but I want to know you, and I want you to be better—not better as you used to be, but better as you will be, because I know that those are different.  I know that going back isn’t an option; it isn’t an option for me either.  But I know that fixing yourself is important.  I fixed myself.  I took the time and spent the money and made myself what I wanted to be.  You broke how you were.  And I think that’s what’s killing you inside. I don’t know if that’s true though, because I don’t know how to say it._

_You’ve always been the wordsmith.  I’ve always been the artist.  So maybe I can make art out of the words in my head and maybe you can see that I’m trying and that you and me—we’re in this together.  We always have been.  We always will be.  Because I’m not leaving you behind.  I just don’t know how to jump back for you right now.  But I’m learning—I’m trying, because if you can’t pull yourself up, I’ll jump in and get you._

Bucky slid down his doorframe and felt hot, salty tears on his lips.

* 

He called Natasha and she came over after class. He asked her about her childhood, about her father, about her mother, about her family’s history with the KGB and the Communist Party.  He asked her to say his name in Russian, to say her name in Russian, to say Steve’s name in Russian.  He asked her why she didn’t feel uncomfortable when he told her about his drugs, and why she cared so much about Steve and Clint and the rest of them when she wasn’t half so open and loving as them, but seemed to be in a constant state of figuring out her shit. 

“Why did you lie?” he asked her at last. 

She looked down at her hands, thinking, before lifting her head and locking eyes with him.  “I didn’t want to make it worse.  I didn’t know if telling you would make it worse, so I didn’t.” 

“You’re not going to apologize?”  It was only barely a question—could have easily been a statement, or a description.  He knew he shouldn’t be surprised.  Natasha was anything but apologetic.  

She shook her head very slightly, so that he only noticed it from the way that her hair swung back and forth. “You don’t need me to apologize.” Her words hung in the air like lightning bugs, points of clarity on a dark night.  “You don’t even want me to.  You understand why I did it.  You want Olga to apologize, but I can’t do that for you.” 

Bucky bit the inside of his lip, remembering how Olga hadn’t even called to say goodbye when he’d gone off to rehab and the way that Natasha looked when she first dragged him out to a party.  He remembered Natasha and her dance recitals and the way she poked fun at Steve and the way she asked him every question he was afraid to ask himself.  He remembered Natasha, who took him as he was and might not have even liked him if he hadn’t been through hell and back at all—and then they fucked.

* 

It was the middle of the night on a Thursday, and he heard Steve snoring faintly in the next room over.  Bucky took hold of the charcoal, watching as his hands went black as he drew in between Steve’s words—drew the Brooklyn Bridge and Prospect Park, and the way he felt like the third rail on a subway line where if you touched it you’d electrocute yourself and die, but Steve was the tracks guiding the train along.  He drew Natasha—badly, but well enough to be recognized, and Olga (even worse, because her face was distorted and melty in his memory) and spoons and cigarettes and what he imagined him and Steve looked like now, and what they had been back then. 

He stayed up all night looking at the words mixed with the drawings, and when Steve came out of his room the next day, they sat together in silence, and for the first time in what felt like years Bucky wasn’t waiting for a question to answer, and Steve wasn’t wondering what he should ask.


End file.
